Opening New Freeway, Los Angeles Ends Era

By ROBERT REINHOLD,

Published: October 14, 1993

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 13—
More than half a century after Los Angeles ushered in the modern automobile era of urban commuting with the first California freeway, officials on Thursday will open what is almost certainly the area's last freeway.

The high-tech Century Freeway, a 17.3-mile stretch running east-west from Los Angeles International Airport through nine cities to suburban Norwalk, cost more per mile than any other road in America.

The project was as much social engineering as civil engineering. It was completed only after the builders agreed under a Federal consent decree to spend billions in social programs: new housing for the 25,500 displaced people, job training programs for minorities and women, even tutoring and scholarships for poor children and housing for AIDS patients in West Hollywood, 10 miles from the freeway.

Thus the eight-lane road bears all the marks of the social, environmental and technical changes that have swept the United States over the last three decades and, with a price tag of $2.2 billion, shows why few cities will soon try again to build highways through their urban cores. An Urban Closing

It is coincidental but quite symbolic that the opening of the Century comes during the same year that Los Angeles started subway service, and four days before California's first toll road is scheduled to open, the first 3.2 miles of more than 68 miles of tollway planned for suburban Orange County.

"There will still be a need for freeways in the future, but they will undoubtedly be only in the fringes of regions," said Professor Martin Wachs, director of the Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The opening of the Century Freeway leaves only 114 miles left to be completed in the 42,796-mile national Interstate highway system, according to the Federal Highway Administration. The largest section is a part of I-287 under construction in New Jersey, meant to bypass New York City. The only other states with significant construction are Hawaii, Louisiana, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Washington.

The new Century Freeway here -- numbered I-105 and officially called the Glenn Anderson Freeway-Transitway after the Democratic Congressman -- is the first built to accommodate a mass transit line. The Green Line, a 23-mile 10-station light rail line due to open next year at a cost of an additional $1 billion, will run down the median.

Even in a metropolitan area with 511 miles of freeways and stacked-up interchanges, this new one is mammoth. Just one of its interchanges, with the San Diego Freeway (I-405), soars more than 7 stories high and covers 100 acres. This interchange has 5 levels, 7 miles of ramps, 11 bridges and 2 miles of tunnels. Sensors in Roadway

The freeway also has two car-pool lanes and is equipped with sensors in the pavement that electronically control the flow of traffic to and from other freeways. It is expected to carry about 230,000 vehicles a day, relieving congestion on the parallel Santa Monica Freeway, the nation's busiest, and other freeways and local streets.

The only other freeways under study in Southern California are extensions of existing ones, including a 6.2-mile extension of the Long Beach Freeway (I-710) into South Pasadena. That project is bogged down in lawsuits and may never be built.

All of this is a far cry from what the road builders had in mind when they first started planning the Century in 1958. They had grander ideas of a 10-lane road stretching 51 miles east to San Bernardino. They were stopped by a Federal lawsuit filed in 1972 by local residents, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the City of Hawthorne, environmental groups and others.

In 1979, the California Department of Transportation entered into a consent decree issued by Judge Harry Pregerson of Federal district court in which the state and the Federal Highway Administration agreed to reduce the length and width of the freeway and to finance social programs to mitigate damage. This included building 5,500 units of new housing, at a cost of $360 million, and an apprentice program that has trained 3,400 people in construction jobs. It also required using businesses owned by women and members of minorities, which have received 34 percent of highway contracts and 46 percent of housing contracts.

In all, actual construction accounted for only 54 percent of the $2.2 billion total cost.

In Judge Pregerson's view, the money spent on social programs was well worth it. "While we are planning to move dirt and pour concrete, we've got to plan for the people whose lives are affected by it," said Judge Pregerson, who now sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in an interview today.

Whether the freeway will ever return its cost as transportation is unclear. "We always had the requirement that people who live in the right of way are reimbursed at fair market value," said Thomas Martin, aide to state Senator Robert Beverly, a longtime backer of the Century. "But in this instance there were add-ons to such a degree that I don't see major freeways coming down the line. Now you see California going to toll roads."

Indeed, decades of resistance to toll roads will end Sunday with the opening of the first leg of the Foothill Tollway. It will ultimately parallel Interstate 5 from the San Diego County line near San Clemente to the Riverside Freeway near Yorba Linda. It is meant to bring badly needed roads to Orange County, where development in the last decade has outpaced the capacity of the few freeways. It features a device allowing drivers to pay the toll without slowing down, through a radio transponder on the dashboard.

The Century Freeway, at $127 million a mile, is by far the most expensive highway in history, transportation experts said. The first freeway in California, the Pasadena Freeway that opened in 1940, cost $1 million a mile. During the 1960's, the cost ran from about $30 to $40 million a mile, and the figure has more recently risen to nearly $100 million for urban roads.

Much of the cost for the Century came from programs that went well beyond helping just those it displaced.

"There is a terrific legacy that has been created through the court order, and it's continuing," said Mary Watson, a project coordinator for Hall & Phillips, the law firm that filed the suit that led to the consent decree.

Thousands of units of new affordable housing are being financed by the project along a 24-mile wide band on both sides of the freeway. But the new apartments are not limited to the displaced but are available to anyone who meets the income requirements, up to $43,000 a year for a family of four. One project-funded apartment building, for example, houses AIDS patients in West Hollywood.

"I'm not saying this is the perfect answer to all things," said G. Allan Kingston, executive director of the Century Freeway Housing Program, which is part of the state Department of Housing and Community Development. "It's one way to make it possible for the communities to not be devastated by the loss of a substantial amount of housing."

But was it worth it as a transportation project? "Yes," said Jack Hallin, project manager of the freeway for the California Department of Transportation. "We got a freeway-transitway, homes, employment in the community. Could we do it again? Probably not."

Photo: Intertwining ramps of the new 17.3-mile Century Freeway are part of the costliest stretch of road ever built in America. (Liliana Nieto Del Rio for The New York Times) Map of Los Angeles showing route of the Century Freeway.